Genealogy, inspired!
Today marks the date in 1882 that Dr. Robert Koch announced his discovery of the bacteria that causes Tuberculosis, also known as TB or (for us family historians) Consumption. To commemorate World Tuberculosis Day, I’d thought I’d share a personal story about TB. A story about how it brought my maternal Grandma from her hometown…
Today marks the birth date for my maternal Great Grandpa, Scottie, born in 1883, but today we’re going to talk about his death.
William Oscar AKA Scottie, is still quite an enigma to me and has been hard to find definitive documentation for except for a few tidbits and a very tragic train crash we’ll have to talk about another day.
That being said, I recently found his Death Certificate, and with the help of the internet Hive Mind, I’ve gained deeper insight into Scottie’s cause of death.
How do you pull together the moments of a life you’ve never glimpsed?
How do you gather random facts about kin from the ether and create a story from the fragments of the past that makes sense in the present?
I don’t know the answers to these questions but I’m trying and trusting that the process of creating each spread in my Heritage Journal is weaving bits of each ancestor’s life into the tapestry of my own being.
I know I’m not alone when I say that I had a difficult relationship with my mom.
With so many individual, familial, and societal forces at play, I’m honestly not sure our culture is set up to nurture and support our mother/daughter relationships in a very positive way, especially through the individuation years, try as we might.
And so, as I’ve sat with the Heritage Journal spread for my mom, my emotions have ebbed and flowed…
Thanks to my maternal Grandma’s writing, I know that Nancy was a Quaker and very much a “woman of her time”. She was expected to do things a certain way and expected the same of her 13 children. Which is why, when Hannah came along and didn’t exactly fall in line, she began telling her how “bold and queer” she was.